In spring of 2011 a small group of people in 100 Mile House, B.C. threw together a pot luck dinner and assembled in a private home to meet and learn from Tamara Sunsong of Victoria’s ‘In Transition’ Group to talk about ‘transitioning away from oil dependence.’
A grassroots movement the world over called ‘Transitioning Towns’ is taking this peak oil thing seriously. The objective is for neighbours to come together to share ideas and create action plans to deal with the times to come.

Okay…at the time we thought it was a good idea. We’d spent a lot of time crammed into the Jeep, effort, and $$ for gas trekking across the beautiful British Columbia landscape. We figured an aerial view from an airplane would be a short cut. Think of all the ground we could cover in such a short time!

Topless…imagine…(the Jeep….not the two girls), forestry roads, dust-grime-dirt on everything!!! 100km of pot holes, boulders, and bovine…we could have walked faster! Never take someone’s word when they tell you a short cut, insist it’s paved, and rave about the view. Good start to our 7000 km search for suitable land to create our Middle Earth Home. Add to that a music festival in the middle of ‘No Vacancy’ signs… town… after town… after town.

The First Step is always the hardest. It’s a leap of faith, a dream, a thought that leads to an action. Monica and I were sitting in our trusty Sahara YJ that we’ve nick named ‘Pearl-the Wonder Jeep’. So it was on one such outing with the wind in our hair and bugs in our teeth (for Pearl is also a convertible) that we conceived The Great Canadian Dream.

Middle Earth Home may have started out as a small dream…a tiny, cute, cob cottage…However, the dream was fed some miracle grow and now we have something much bigger on our hands. It’s not the place we’re going to visit any longer. No, we plan on living there. For the region that we fell in love with we determined all the pros and cons of each type of structure, and decided that it came down to a bio dome or an Earth bermed/Rammed Home, and the cheerful indoor green house won! So now we have a vision of the space we’d like to create not just for ourselves, but also to be part of the local community.

Where should you build? Where should you go? Many of us don’t know where to start. I’d have to say looking back (for this idea came to us sometime in 2005 when Monica first moved to the west coast of Canada) that had we known how long the journey would take, there is a damn…